An Evening with Rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas November 14, 2002

Rem Koolhaas began his career as an architect not by designing a building, but by writing a book. Not the usual kind of architect’s book, full of glossy color pictures, but a book of ideas. Delirious Manhattan purported to be a retrospective manifesto, an account of how New York became the embodiment of what Koolhaas describes as ‘the culture of congestion’. Koolhaas’ architecture is bracing and unsettling and even though nothing he has done yet has had the same popular impact as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim, he is clearly going to be the next big thing.